Building a revolutionary constituency: Mozambican refugees and the development of the FRELIMO proto-state, 1964–1968

During the early 1960s, many Mozambicans fled from the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado and Niassa to the sanctuary and friendly border of Tanganyika (Tanzania) to escape the escalating violence of the anti-colonial war. These Mozambicans experienced, like many political refugees, a crisis of status during this migration. In seeking to survive their migration to Tanzania, many existing social relations among Mozambican refugees were temporarily suspended during this transit. Under the auspices of FRELIMO 1 and the Tanzanian authorities, Mozambican refugees often found that their opportunities during this social breakdown were usually limited and redirected for the purposes of winning the anti-colonial war. Many of these people, regardless of gender or age, were also socially transformed by a continuum of survival skills that I call the bio-social experience. Many Mozambican refugees opted to work with FRELIMO as products of their own individual bio-social experiences. With the assistance of this revolutionary constituency of Mozambican refugees, FRELIMO’s institutional strategies and infrastructure projects inside Tanzania and in northern Mozambique offered an opportunity to demonstrate its early proto-state hegemony and revolutionary Pragmatism.